Ben Marcus on How to Honor a Catastrophe

In your story “Blueprints for St. Louis,” Ida and Roy are an architect
couple who design memorials for sites where acts of terrorism have taken
place. This month marked the sixteenth anniversary of September 11,
2001. Were you thinking of the 9/11 memorial and Michael Arad’s
reflecting pools when you wrote the story?

Not so much, but I see it pretty clearly in retrospect. Had I been more
aware of the connection, I might have avoided the story, or been
unproductively cautious, so maybe I used a little bit of denial to make
myself believe that the story was, instead, about a broken couple, stuck
in a successful collaborative partnership, with strikingly different
ideas about how to respond to catastrophe. Once the story was underway,
I did think about the very public vetting of the 9/11-memorial design
ideas, and how difficult that process was. Such profoundly different
perspectives were colliding, with the families of the victims playing an
understandably prominent role. It felt almost as if the whole culture
was involved in the question of what kind of design could possibly
begin to capture, address, and honor what people were feeling. It was
obviously a nightmarish situation for an architect, but maybe a
necessary one.

As Ida says in the story, you can’t leave the page blank in order to
represent absence—you have to build something to represent nothing.
Michael Arad depicted the void of the missing World Trade Center towers
and their inhabitants with a pair of waterfalls descending into the
earth. Ida imagines smoke-filled columns rising from the ground; Roy
envisions a glass building with a dark, impenetrable core. How did you
come up with the ideas for the memorials in the story?

At one point in the story, Ida tells Roy that some people believe that
if only their vision were sharper they’d be able to see the dead. I’m
not sure if there are people out there who really think that, but Ida
senses that there is more to see in the world, if only we can peel away
the surface. Maybe the columns of smoke are, for her, an attempt to
sharpen our vision, to reveal something that we can’t quite see with our
very limited eyes. You know, if our vision were to improve radically,
what would we see? What would it tell us? Roy’s ideas, on the other
hand, draw more directly on tradition; they seem more obvious and even
derivative, so they weren’t so hard for me to imagine. It turns out that
I have a gift for the derivative.

Roy and Ida disagree on how to think about their assignment. Ida wants
somehow to provide an experience of the afterlife, to transport
survivors to the place where their loved ones are. Roy wants to get
something built. Ida’s may be the more admirable and imaginative goal,
but Roy’s is more realistic, or isn’t it? Whose vision do you think
should be funded?

Ida’s proposal may be more searching, but even she worries that her idea
is insufficient and wrong, that it can’t do what she wants it to. I
could see her deciding not to fund her own project, although I’d much
rather visit her design than Roy’s. I was most drawn to Ida’s
ambivalence and uncertainty, her quest to do something worthy of the
people who had died, even while knowing that that wasn’t possible. The
funding question is challenging. In the story, there’s a line to the
effect that everyone in the country is a stakeholder in these designs,
everyone is the client, because everyone is being impacted. The politics
around such a project become gruesome. A city has been attacked and
thousands of people have died. What could possibly honor such a
catastrophe?

There’s a certain cynicism in the story about the idea (or practice) of
building memorials for public tragedies. (“They made their mark by
designing large public graves where people could gather and also where
maybe really cool food trucks would park,” for instance.) Is that
cynicism Ida’s or also partly yours?

I read it less as cynicism than as a kind of despair and resignation on
Ida’s part. There will be commerce attached to these sacred sites—not
just in terms of food trucks but from pharmaceutical companies, which
have attached themselves to the projects in the story in a highly
disturbing way. So maybe I’m cynical about drug-assisted architecture,
but it doesn’t exist yet, so far as I know. And, actually, if it did, I
might really like to try it. I recently spent some time in Berlin, which
seems to have memorials around every corner, and it was a striking
experience. I was with my kids, and it caused us to speak almost
non-stop about what had happened there, in that very location where we
were standing. It led to conversations that we otherwise would not have
had, and, mostly, it stimulated their curiosity about the past and about
what people will do to one another and why. When we got back to New
York, I realized how uncommon it is to connect to one’s location with
any historical perspective. Something similar happened when I took my
kids to the 9/11 memorial and the museum. So cynicism is the last thing
I feel when it comes to the potential of a memorial.

Why did you choose St. Louis as the site of the (fictional) terrorist
attack in this story?

St. Louis is among a group of cities that have been attacked in the
story, and maybe it suggests that the vulnerability and exposure are
felt across the country, and are not limited to the more obvious, bigger
cities. Character names and locations usually arrive unfiltered for me,
and then I’m stuck with them. Using a real place name made me feel
uneasy, so I stayed with it. I felt locked into something. Maybe with
other harder-to-believe ideas floating around in the story—memorials
assisted with drug spouts, to deepen the emotional experience of the
visitors—a real place name was a necessary anchor.

The story is written as a kind of third-person interior monologue; we
experience the action from Ida’s point of view. Was she always the
narrator of this tale? Did you consider writing from Roy’s perspective
as well?

This was always Ida’s story. I haven’t written much from a female
perspective, and I was deep into the story before I realized that that
was what I was doing. I didn’t flirt with writing from Roy’s
perspective, but, at the same time, I felt close to him at first, his
transgressions and his capitulations. He kind of disappears from the
story, though, and Ida gives him little thought. At the end, she sees
him standing alone, clapping his hands very hard, in a strange and
inscrutable act. I have no idea why he does this or what it means.

A couple of years ago, in the introduction to the anthology “New
American Stories,”
which you edited, you wrote, “When I want to be ambushed, captured,
thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot
stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably
vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories.” What does a story
have to do to ambush you in that way? How do you try to ambush your
readers?

If only I knew.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.